BAGHDAD, Dec 26: Seventeen Iraqis, including eight policemen, were killed in insurgent attacks in and around Baghdad on Monday as a Shia politician was gunned down and a provincial governor narrowly escaped an assassination attempt.

Some 30 rebels, armed with mortars and anti-tank weapons as well as small arms, took part in the deadliest assault — an attack on a police checkpoint in ethnically mixed Diyala province northeast of the capital, police said.

Five policemen were killed and another four wounded in the morning assault in the village of Buhruz, just outside the provincial capital of Baquba. Police said they killed six insurgents.

Gunmen later opened fire on the car of local councillor Suad Jaafari, a member of the main Shia alliance, killing her and three bodyguards.

Insurgents also targeted Diyala governor Raed Rashid Mulla Jawad with a car bomb as he was leaving Baquba for his home village of Beni Tamim further north. The governor survived but one of his bodyguards was killed and two wounded.

Baquba has seen repeated insurgent attacks in recent weeks, including an assault on an army outpost that killed eight soldiers Friday.

In Baghdad, two police and two civilians were killed as four separate bombings targeted police patrols, the interior ministry said. A further 25 people were wounded.

Insurgents also detonated a booby-trapped motorcycle in a busy marketplace in the predominantly Shiite Shula neighbourhood of north Baghdad, killing one and wounding 23.

A university professor, Nofal Ahmed, was killed by gunmen outside his home and police said they had also recovered the bodies of three people killed in and around the capital, one of them a policeman.—AFP